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How to Decide What to Build

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Re: How to Decide What to Build

#91

Post by cornholio »

acconrad wrote: post #28

One of the points the author makes is that you should track the problems you have, and the ones that reoccur will be good signals to solve them. Does anyone else feel pretty content with what they have? Because this strategy I think Paul Graham has talked about in one of his essays for ideas. And to be honest, I do genuinely feel like I don't have much if anything to complain about, and so I can't really think of sta…

I'm exceptionally lazy and always feel the need more machines. I need a machine that washes and flosses my teeth fast and thoroughly, I waste 15-20 minutes each day doing that. I need a robotic dishwasher/cupboard cabinet that I simply open the lid, trow the dirty plates then simply pick them up clean from the adjacent cupboard. Ditto for dry, ironed laundry. I need a food printer with attached smart refrigerator that I can download my favorite recipes into and will order the necessary ingredients and automatically cook the meal at the programmed time. A flying machine, oh man, how much I need a flying machine.

Ok, maybe those are grand ideas that need billions of dollars of research, but any one of those involves a myriad of smaller improvements that can turn into startup products. The potential for improving our lives is so vast I cannot imagine how could anyone say "I have everything I need".

Re: How to Decide What to Build

#92

Post by jessesoo »

pryelluw wrote: post #40
acconrad wrote: post #28

One of the points the author makes is that you should track the problems you have, and the ones that reoccur will be good signals to solve them. Does anyone else feel pretty content with what they have? Because this strategy I think Paul Graham has talked about in one of his essays for ideas. And to be honest, I do genuinely feel like I don't have much if anything to complain about, and so I can't really think of sta…

I don't normally talk about this, but here is what you are missing: Businesses that make (real) money revolve around one of two ideas: - They sell shovels - They are middlemen (middlepeople?) They sell shovels. This is stolen from the old saying that during the American gold rush the people who made the money were the ones selling shovels. Or facilitating others to go and do what they wanted (in this case, chase a wi…

Depending on how you look at it, I don't think Uber (as of now) is selling shovels, I look at Uber as the middleman between the riders and the drivers, their job primarily in optimally satisfying the ride-hailing market demand.

Re: How to Decide What to Build

#93

Post by TeMPOraL »

icebraining wrote: post #89
TeMPOraL wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm founding Uber for Biotech. No biosafety regulation is going to stop us from CRISPRing our way into better future! Seriously though, I get that archaic rules need to be fought in order to be changed. But there are proper ways to do that, and Uber did it in about the most antisocial way possible aside from murdering people. Please, don't be like Uber. Innovations need a stable society to flourish.

If you want to convince people, you should give an example of a business that faced a similar problem and fought it the correct way.

Discussing this locally, I usually give example of iCar, which is a people transportation company that run borderline-afoul of taxi laws in my city (Kraków, Poland). Their innovation back ~10 years ago (or more) was to drive primarily by GPS, bill by distance instead of time, and thus being able to tell you how much you'll pay before even starting the trip. The primary point of conflict was, AFAIR, that iCar figured out a sorta-loophole that allowed them to have one taxi license for the entire company instead of for each individual driver.

There was some bad blood between them and the regular taxi corps, some tyres got slashed, but the court sorted things out, updated the regulations a bit, and now iCar and other companies happily coexist. The major difference between them and Uber is that they didn't keep breaking law with impunity, but engaged in finding a legal solution and made the entire space better for everyone.

Sure, this is not the path to exponential growth, but maybe not everything is best done by VC-backed "zero to billion dollars corporation in 5 years" businesses.

Re: How to Decide What to Build

#94

Post by adwn »

ed wrote: post #54
acconrad wrote: post #28

One of the points the author makes is that you should track the problems you have, and the ones that reoccur will be good signals to solve them. Does anyone else feel pretty content with what they have? Because this strategy I think Paul Graham has talked about in one of his essays for ideas. And to be honest, I do genuinely feel like I don't have much if anything to complain about, and so I can't really think of sta…

Find something new-ish (e.g. AI, cryptocurrencies), and learn as much as possible about that thing (like, build a toy version of it, get an intuitive understanding of its parts). Product ideas and applications will jump out at you. The kind of ideas you get when you're deliberately trying to come up with ideas, are always obvious and often startup cliches (like food delivery).

> AI, cryptocurrencies [...] The kind of ideas you get when you're deliberately trying to come up with ideas, are always obvious and often startup cliches (like food delivery).

I would say that AI and cryptocurrencies are the startup clichés of today.

Don't start with a solution in search of a problem. Instead, start with a problem, and see if you can find a solution. When comparing problem-solution pairs, discount those that involve trendy, hyped technologies, to account for mental bias.

Re: How to Decide What to Build

#95

Post by illwrks »

The best bit of advice I saw (on HN no less) that helped frame this in my mind was "every spreadsheet is an opportunity". This was in reference to processes within a company, where employees use spreadsheets to manage data, etc.

Re: How to Decide What to Build

#96

Post by ObeyTheGuts »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #46
snitko wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This only applies to US and a bunch of other countries that would bother to enforce the law regarding cooking regulation. Most countries wouldn't really care as they have more important issues to solve than clamp down on innocent people making informed choices about their lives. So the idea isn't really bad.

> Most countries wouldn't really care as they have more important issues to solve than clamp down on innocent people making informed choices about their lives. So the idea isn't really bad. Yup. More important issues like no rule of law, no sanitation, low literacy rates, mob rule, etc. "Clamping down on innocent people making informed choices about their lives" is what you get to once you stabilize a society and sol…

food? in usa? where?

Re: How to Decide What to Build

#97

Post by enz »

pryelluw wrote: post #40
acconrad wrote: post #28

One of the points the author makes is that you should track the problems you have, and the ones that reoccur will be good signals to solve them. Does anyone else feel pretty content with what they have? Because this strategy I think Paul Graham has talked about in one of his essays for ideas. And to be honest, I do genuinely feel like I don't have much if anything to complain about, and so I can't really think of sta…

I don't normally talk about this, but here is what you are missing: Businesses that make (real) money revolve around one of two ideas: - They sell shovels - They are middlemen (middlepeople?) They sell shovels. This is stolen from the old saying that during the American gold rush the people who made the money were the ones selling shovels. Or facilitating others to go and do what they wanted (in this case, chase a wi…

In this case, who is the middleman selling shovels for food? Uber Eats/Deliveroo/Foodora? I think they are middlemen between a restaurant which makes food, someone who wants to make some cash from his bike, and the client.

Re: How to Decide What to Build

#98

Post by enz »

shubhamjain wrote: post #51
acconrad wrote: post #28

One of the points the author makes is that you should track the problems you have, and the ones that reoccur will be good signals to solve them. Does anyone else feel pretty content with what they have? Because this strategy I think Paul Graham has talked about in one of his essays for ideas. And to be honest, I do genuinely feel like I don't have much if anything to complain about, and so I can't really think of sta…

I would suggest trying to think about what task your team has to do often that is better done by a software--a minor but recurring annoyance. Like, in my case, - Backend and Frontend development are never in sync, so we have to resort to mocking the API by using dummy code. There are API mocking services, but I would prefer something that mocks locally. Charles Proxy is great for this but it can be limiting and isn't…

> If there was a product that could tell us the trail of actions that the customers followed, it'll make debugging vastly easier.

Sentry.io may be a good start, perhaps?

Re: How to Decide What to Build

#99

Post by heinrichhartman »

> One strategy is to think of annoyances you have in your life

In this way you will only end up with consumer products. I did this when I was 12 and ended up building a fully automated "egg cutting machine" which solved my annoyance (and created a ton more) but had little market value. The B2B market is huge. I am most interested in solving hard problems that large organizations have with their internal processes. Unfortunately I don't work for one, so the annoyances I want to solve are not my own.

Re: How to Decide What to Build

#100

Post by vinceguidry »

acconrad wrote: post #28

One of the points the author makes is that you should track the problems you have, and the ones that reoccur will be good signals to solve them. Does anyone else feel pretty content with what they have? Because this strategy I think Paul Graham has talked about in one of his essays for ideas. And to be honest, I do genuinely feel like I don't have much if anything to complain about, and so I can't really think of sta…

You're not thinking about problems hard enough. Instead just giving up when something sounds vaguely hard. Get rid of the vagueness, figure out exactly how hard it is.

As per your example, have you done the research concerning health codes and what sorts of operations violate them and which don't? I'm pretty sure off the top of my head that if you're not actually selling food, as in taking in payments and delivering food, you're not on the hook for what other people are doing in their homes.

So I can envision a service facilitating neighborhood meal swaps. The state might not exactly like it, but it won't have anyone to go after for health code violations. This is pretty much exactly what Uber did, they kept toeing ever closer to the line of the actually illegal until they had both the legal budget and a public mandate to fight City Hall.

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